Increasingly work and communication are occurring in geographically independent and device independent manners. Advances in communications and the Internet have made the physical location of individuals and the types of devices used by those individuals largely irrelevant.
However, there are challenges in assuring security and enforcing desired communication policy in such an environment. For example, consider communication related to reviewing documents. With document review, reviewers may each add instructions or feedback for the content of a particular document under review. This feedback may be made within the document being reviewed itself. This permits recipient reviewers to see other feedback and see a history of feedback for the document. Yet, if the document is being reviewed by a reviewer that is not located within an enterprise or an organization that owns and is managing the document and its feedback, then synchronization, support, policy enforcement, and security can become problematic issues.
In other words, feedback for a document being reviewed may be managed within a local environment of an enterprise, such that it is assured of being appropriate and integrated with local participants. The appropriateness of the feedback relies on the fact that the local participants are known users to the local environment and are perhaps employees of an enterprise, which controls the local environment. The enterprise has some control over the local participant and can enforce its own policies, etc. Thus, it is likely that the local participants will be appropriate in their feedback and if they are not appropriate, then action can be taken by the enterprise against the local participants.
Integrating feedback from external participants is more problematic and more of a security and policy risk. This is so, because the local environment managing the feedback may not be capable of authenticating the true identity of external participants and may not be capable of exerting control over any inappropriate feedback. It may also be that an errant external participant maliciously riddles a document with worthless and voluminous feedback to dilute the value of any other comments included in the document. In some cases, a malicious external participant may be adept enough to embed a virus within the document having the feedback, and the virus may be capable of alluding existing virus scan software of the enterprise.
Consequently, feedback is usually limited to local participants within an enterprise and if external feedback is provided it is often manually entered and supplied by a local participant. This is time consuming and may result in valuable feedback being missed. Yet, the risk of security or policy being breached is more important to an enterprise than ensuring all feedback in a document review is captured. Thus, there has been little done to change this present situation within the industry.
Therefore, it is advantageous to provide improved techniques for reviewing content in a secure and integrated manner irrespective of whether participants are local to where the content is natively owned and managed or external to where the content is natively owned and managed.